Online social networks facilitate sharing of information and interaction among users of the social network. Users typically register with the social network in order for their respective information, interests, preferences, and other associated data to persist over successive sessions. Although the vast majority of users engage in authorized activity on the network, unfortunately there is a subset of users that may engage in unauthorized activity that is adverse to other users and/or the social network at large. Examples of unauthorized activity include spamming one or more other users or scrapping information about one or more other users from the social network platform.
The social network platform may have controls or limits in place to prevent mass misappropriation of information, especially user information. For example, a user may be limited to a certain number of page requests per day. But in response, certain users may simply continue making page requests until he or she is blocked from making further requests, limit the number of requests to just below the request limit, or create multiple accounts on the social network to circumvent the per user limit. At the same time, there are instances when large number page requests are legitimate. Furthermore, when a social network has millions or hundreds of millions of registered users, the amount of activity generated by the registered users on the social network platform at any given time is of such a scale that maintaining a secure network without unduly restricting users or activities is difficult.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.